As the internet and cloud computing play a greater role in an ever expanding networked society, the number and size of data centers will continue to increase to support the demand of users worldwide. Data centers provide cloud computing services such as Web search, online social networking, online office and Information Technology (IT) infrastructure for individuals and organizations around the world. Hence, data centers include tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers that share information between each other and other data centers over the Internet.
As data centers increase in size, the complexity in configuring and connecting hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment by hand also increases. As new data centers become larger the amount of time and effort to configure or setup vast amounts of equipment will take longer. Additionally, increasing the amount of data center equipment also increases the probability of malfunctioning equipment or miswired equipment. Configuring new pieces of equipment to replace malfunctioning equipment in a timely manner will increase data center efficiency. Also, as greater amounts of new equipment are used to expand existing data centers, the ability to quickly configure new pieces of equipment to increase data center capacity will become more desirable. As data centers become larger the amount of information to review to determine that equipment is configured and connected properly becomes larger and more time consuming to analyze.